Research on a rodent business

[Panamajackk]

Hi i am looking into starting a rodent breeding business. Where i live there is the big name pet stores that will sell a large rat for 10 bucks, and a weaned mouse cost 2.50. I have 6 ball pythons and 4 corns and a red tail. So it is getting expensive to feed them all. My friends and roommates have reptiles too and they would buy from me. I will have a 10 by 20 work space to work in.

So my questions are:
1) how much on average does it cost per rat to raise it from a pinkie to large?(a guess works)
2)How many males and females do i need to have around 20 pinkies a week?
3)How much time do you think i will spend up keep the colony a week?
4)What prices should i sell them at?
5) Any other advice you can give to a noob?

Thanks

[BuckeyeBalls]

This is a quest for Tom. Hes the rodent expert

Ill answer one or 2 that i know of.

1) how much on average does it cost per rat to raise it from a pinkie to large?(a guess works)

This i would love to know as i sell feeders myself that are extras.

2)How many males and females do i need to have around 20 pinkies a week?

Well it takes (21 i think?) days from the time one gets prego before she has her babies. So you would have to have one female being bred every week. here is a good thread

http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...-Many-to-Breed

3)How much time do you think i will spend up keep the colony a week?

Well i feed like once a week using a decent size hopper or a rat rack filled with food. Using rat racks and a gravity watering system i say max is 2 days per week.

Say you clean Sunday. Your first day caring for them may be in the middle of the week when u goto feed/water them if ur food/water doesnt last all week per rack. (this quest is assuming ur using racks) and then your second day would be cleaning day which u would feed/water them. If your food/water last all week then just 1 day.

4)What prices should i sell them at?

If your selling them live. Tbh NO ONE can give u the best answer. Supply and demand. Like around here there are not to many rodent breeders selling on craigslist. So i can change $3 per med rat. Other option for buyers? Goto a pet store and pay $6. If theres a surplus of breeders in ur area then the price will be lower, if ur the only one selling you can sell for a bit more

5) Any other advice you can give to a noob?

Racks with gravity watering system

[tomfromtheshade]

Hahaha...I will fish through here and answer what I can. Do yourself a favor and don't do it. I made the mistake of getting involved in rodent breeding. Now it has become a burden and an addiction LOL.

If you're doing it to save money on feeding your own stock then go ahead. If you plan on making money doing it I would advice against it. You won't make any money LOL. I just threw away about fifty pounds of jumbos. Its a ridiculous business and I kind of regret doing it myself.

I am going to copy and paste your questions in another post along with my answers.

[tomfromtheshade]

1) how much on average does it cost per rat to raise it from a pinkie to large?(a guess works)

It all depends on how you are raising them. If you are feeding them rodent block at $0.50 per pound they will be more expensive than if you are feeding them $0.35 per pound dog food or if you are growing them out on $0.22 per pound hard corn. If you buy your feed in bulk, by the pallet or the ton you will save more. I won't put down what my costs are to produce a large rat because it really isn't anyone's business, but you will just have to do some experimental research. I will tell you that it is much cheaper than buying them at the store.

2)How many males and females do i need to have around 20 pinkies a week?

If you only need 20 pinkies per week then you just need to do some basic math. I would recommend that you have three females birthing every week to make sure that you get your 20 pinks per week. With such a small quantity needed I would recommend that you house each female individually in her own tub to birth, nurse and wean the pups.

3)How much time do you think i will spend up keep the colony a week?
With such a small number of rats its not going to take you more than 30 minutes per day to care for them (and that is only if you spend some time checking them out and fiddling with them. If you just feed and water that shouldn't take more than five minutes. It shouldn't take more than half an hour to clean all of the tubs if you really take your time doing it.

4)What prices should i sell them at?

Just like anything else you need to calculate your costs before you set your prices. In order to sell them fast enough to avoid becoming over run with rats you will probably have to blow them out at fire sale prices. Like I said, don't plan on making any money with this.

5) Any other advice you can give to a noob?

My advice is don't do it. If you want to do it to make money you will fail. The only people that make money breeding rats are the people taht have at least 1000 breeding females going with lots and lots regular customers.

I can tell you that one of my breeding racks, with five males and twenty females plus their pups eat about 20 pounds of feed every week. They also go through about half a bale of pine shavings every week. Use that as a base figure for your math.

If you decide to use your 10' x 20' area for rat breeding this is how I would set it up. Your initial set up should take everything into account, from your air conditioning, to your ventilation, to your water access, to your room for growing out larger sizes, to storing frozen rodents. With such a small space you will have to keep your feed and your shavings in a different location (perhaps a small storage shed?).



I hope that his helps you wrap your brain around this endeavor a little bit better. The set up that I outlined shows one breeding rack (five levels high using larger mortar tubs), five birthing/nursing racks (six levels high using medium mortar tubs), which will allow you to keep 30 females in high production all the time.

Under this system you can leave your babies in the birthing/nursing tubs for the first stage of their growing out. Pull the mom when the babies are 28 days old. Separate the babies by sex at this point (combine two litters that are close in age). You can leave your weaned rats in the medium mixing tubs until you need the tub again for another pregnant female. When the medium tub starts looking cramped you can move your grow outs to one of the larger holding racks.

I use the three trash cans: one for feed, one for clean shavings, and one for dirty shavings. You will want to find someplace to dump your dirty shavings. Maybe your town has a place to dump stuff like that for compost? You will have to look into it.

The main thing is that you really won't be making a ton of money on this. If your rat breeding allows you to feed your snakes for free then you have done well.

This set up is a little overkill, but there isn't much in the world that pisses me off more than a cramped, stinking, rat room.

[tomfromtheshade]

Also, Rodentpro defines a "large rat" as a rat that is 43 to 60 days old. I personally wouldn't call a rat large unless it is at least 8 weeks old. Also, I would only grow males out to larger sizes. Keep the females that you are holding back for breeding, but you should use females for the majority of your feeders in the pup to medium range. After they get to medium size the males grow much larger much faster.

Okay, so lets say that you have a litter of rats. You wean them at 28 days. At this point you put your males in a grow out tub to grow them up to 56 days (large size). You just have to calculate how much food they eat and how much pine you go through to get them that size. Divide the total cost by the number of rats and you will have your cost. Its impossible to say how much it will cost you without knowing what you pay for feed and pine, but I would say that you could raise a large rat for under a dollar. However, this is just your cost in feed and pine. You also have to consider electricity, water, and time.

Like I said before, this isn't a get rich quick business. I have been plugging away for over a year getting my rodent business up and running and I have hundreds of breeding females and its still not enough to do it as a full time business.

[tomfromtheshade]

There are also other ways of doing things. You can raise your females up for breeding and then pull them when you wean your babies and use your females for larges. With this plan you have to keep growing up and rotating new females into your colony.

This method allows you to use breeding animals for larger sizes and then you don't have to feed non breeding animals up to large, XL, and jumbo sizes. This works out better for some people.

You just have to sit down and plan it all out. Like I said, I have been doing this large scale for quite some time now. You will have to forgive me for not posting all of the secrets of the trade openly on the internet for all to read. It has taken me a lot of time, sweat, and dollars to figure out the most effective way to do it and I don't really want to dole out the Colonel's secret recipe.

[Powerspythons]

Oh Tom, You're like the old wise man of rat breeding... LOL

[BuckeyeBalls]

Also. Ill say this from experience. The money isnt in frozen rats

Frozen rats go for what $1.20-$1.30 for mediums? I can sell mediums for $3-4 all day long on craigslist. If your looking to do this and ship them best to get "monthly orders" for people wanting live rats before u gas them to sell them for $1.30. Like you said your stuck paying $6 per rat... Same around here. I have a lot of people willing to pay $3 a rat.

[tomfromtheshade]

Also. Ill say this from experience. The money isnt in frozen rats

Frozen rats go for what $1.20-$1.30 for mediums? I can sell mediums for $3-4 all day long on craigslist. If your looking to do this and ship them best to get "monthly orders" for people wanting live rats before u gas them to sell them for $1.30. Like you said your stuck paying $6 per rat... Same around here. I have a lot of people willing to pay $3 a rat.

That's it. I'm moving back to Columbus. If I could get $3.00 per rat I could do this full time.

[wilomn]

Be glad you're not out here. Cut throat doesn't quite describe it.

Also bright-eyed ambitious newb, just one wipeout will set you back weeks. Too hot, too cold, food mixup, A/C goes out, heater doesn't go off, fan dies, not to mention disease.

Lose 100-150 breeders overnight and you may want to rethink the whole thing.